Tremain, Rose. The Road Home. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2007.This is the story of Lev, a widower who immigrates to England from an unnamed Eastern European country. Tremain's graceful prose, richly described setting details, absorbing story, and fully developed characters take me away from my privileged and prosaic little world into Lev's world, a world once veiled by the Iron Curtain, with unpronounceable names that have too many consonants. A world where the "gray" market flourishes as West meets East through streetwise entrepreneurs. A world where fish sometimes glow in the dark and young women too often die of leukemia, where the electricity may or may not work, where a refurbished bicycle is a primary means of transportation, where sawmills routinely "run out of trees". A world used to deprivation.From the ten hour bus ride to London to the short "road home" at the end, I was captivated by Lev, an endearing, lovable, honorable, flawed, quintessentially human man. I was equally captivated by the London he occupies and the company he keeps there. We have the pretentiously named G.K. Ashe, known as "Chef", owner/proprietor of a five-star restaurant; Lydia, Lev's seat mate on the long bus ride, a warm and generous woman with "moles like splashes of mud on her face"; Sophie, whose plump arms (and rough sex) catch and keep Lev's attention, after five years of celibacy following his wife's death from cancer at age 36; Christy, Lev's Irish and alcoholic landlord-cum-friend, whose ex-wife seems to have Amazonian qualities. And Rudi, Lev's link to home--Lev finds solace and respite in memories of a lifetime with this cheerful, resilient childhood friend. Rudi's vibrant personality fills the crevices of Lev's homesickness, providing much-needed laughter through both memories and infrequent phone conversations. Rudi's "Tchevi", an ancient Chevrolet Phoenix (a car I neither remember nor could track down), provides local taxi service back home; Rudi keeps the car running through sheer grit. The car itself is a minor character, a vehicle (pardon the pun) through which we see the routine shortages of Lev's home country--and the routine resourcefulness of its people.This is a socially conscious novel, to be sure. We can't miss the poverty and despair that force Lev to immigrate, but we are drawn into the universal themes of life, his and ours--love, loss, grief, injustice. We identify with Lev even as we are fascinated by his "other-ness."Tremain's award-winning novel uses old-fashioned pacing, characterization, and narrative panache to stretch our sound-byte-jaded attention spans, wooing us into "something wild and beautiful and full of woe."